Abstract [en]

The present report reviews findings about FO patterns and in specific the realisation of the Swedish accent 1 and accent 2 tone patterns. We have developed a novel system for normalizing FO contours which allows the handling of male and female data in a common frame. It also facilitates the sorting out of individual patterns from a norm. For this purpose we have defined a semitone scale with a fixed reference. As in the Fujisaki model, we have employed a superposition scheme of adding local FO modulations to prosodic phrase contours, but with different shaping algorithms. The influence of the syntactic frame, and of word prominence and its relation to the single peak of accent 1 and the dual peak of accent 2 has been quantified. Some language universal traits, such as time constants and typical shapes of local FO patterns, are discussed. The perceptual smoothing of local FO contours has been illustrated in a simple experiment which relates to the concept of an auditory time constant. Our Swedish prosody modules have ensured a high quality in synthesis and a robustness in performance with respect to uncertainties in text parsing. Modifications for English and French prosody have provided promising results.